The U.S. EPA devoted substantial resources to making discretionary rules, many of which are "more congenial to industry," instead of fulfilling its legal obligation to curtail toxic air contaminants, a federal judge has ruled.

In the opinion issued Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman in Washington, D.C., sided with the Sierra Club and told the Environmental Protection Agency that he didn't accept the agency's excuse that it missed deadlines for regulating some industries because it was busy taking other actions.

Friedman in March told the EPA to complete regulations by 2009, denying the agency's request for a 2012 deadline.

The EPA has set emission standards for only 15 of the 70 industries that must be regulated under the Clean Air Act of 1990, the judge said in the opinion, which gives his reasons for ordering tougher deadlines.

Some of those unregulated industries include the manufacturing of plastics, paints, pesticides and chemicals. Others include businesses that strip paint, distribute gasoline, refurbish cars, preserve wood, and forge iron and steel. Dozens of different hazardous air pollutants come under regulation.

The EPA also has missed deadlines to control sufficient amounts of smog-forming emissions from consumer and commercial products, the judge said. Products such as spray paints and solvents, for example, can emit compounds that contribute to smog.

The opinion comes a week after the Government Accountability Office released a report saying that the EPA hadn't given top priority to regulating air contaminants, and had failed to protect the public.

On Thursday, EPA spokesman John Millett said the agency "is working to meet the new deadlines set by the court."

Millett cited the agency's announcement of stronger regulations on dry cleaners three weeks ago as an example. By 2007, EPA's regulations will have cut emissions by an estimated 1.7 million tons per year, he said.

Millett wouldn't say whether the EPA intended to appeal the decision. The agency had argued that it couldn't meet deadlines because it needed the time to produce high-quality regulations and was burdened by other regulatory responsibilities.

In the opinion, the judge said he supported the Sierra Club's argument that "it is inappropriate for an agency to divert to purely discretionary rule-making resources that conceivably could go toward fulfilling obligations clearly mandated by Congress."

The EPA, including its Office of Air and Radiation, "currently devotes substantial resources to discretionary rule-makings, many of which make existing regulations more congenial to industry, and several which since have been found unlawful," the judge said.

"EPA has been grossly delinquent in making serious efforts to comply" with congressional direction in the Clean Air Act, he wrote.

The history of regulation under the law's air toxics and consumer products provisions shows that the "EPA has fulfilled its statutory duties only when forced by litigation to do so," the judge wrote. "By all appearances, EPA's failure to promulgate the required standards owes less to the magnitude of the task at hand than to 'the foot-dragging efforts of a delinquent agency,' " he said, citing language from a U.S. Court of Appeals decision, "or to an attempt by EPA to prioritize its own regulatory agenda over that set by Congress."

Earthjustice, a nonprofit law group that represents the Sierra Club, had supplied the judge with a list of discretionary rules from the EPA that took time away from adopting the air toxics rules for businesses. It included removing coal-fired power plants from the list of sources for which air toxics standards are required and reducing industry's toxic-release reporting requirements.

"We're pleased that the judge has put EPA on a schedule to finally control this toxic pollution," said Jim Pew, an Earthjustice attorney.